


Not Waving But Drowning

by thehollowones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brotherly Angst, Gen, One Shot, Sad, Sad Dean Winchester, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 17:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6249385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehollowones/pseuds/thehollowones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In all senses of the phrase, they have always been a nuclear family.</p><p>Dean copes without his brother. Mostly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Waving But Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> A companion fic of sorts to Keep Your Hands Where I Can See 'Em.
> 
> I do not own the rights to these characters.

Now it is winter, and there is only Dean and the Impala and Not Sam. Not Sam who is always at the corner of his eye, sucking up oxygen, bending light, thickening gravity. Tightening Dean’s knuckles on the steering wheel.

(He manufactures omens. If the monster du jour is a banshee, Sam will call. If his diner breakfast is inedible, Sam will come back. If it’s sunny tomorrow, Sam will die of some horrible disease that Dean forgot to have him inoculated against and they will bury him without Dean and get his birthday wrong on the tombstone and Dean will never see him again, not ever, not-)

John fades in and out of his life like a badly tuned radio. In all senses of the phrase, they have always been a nuclear family.

_Divorcer, you were wrong. Divider, you have committed a mortal sin._

Sometimes, there is the hunt. There is the bullet and the gun, the knife and the salt. Dean becomes these things, dissolving his consciousness inside them like a powder, an unholy transubstantiation that is as close as he comes to the inside of a cathedral. The blood and the pain sharpen him to a razor’s edge.

Mostly, there is an endless procession of motel rooms, full of next-door tragedies that are not within his jurisdiction. Mattresses crawling with filth that Dean prostrates himself upon, afraid to move lest he brush up against a memory gone bright at the edges. He feels the finger-curling shame of not having listened, having looked, having _said_.

But always, always there is the relief of it; that the worst has happened and he has survived.

The worst has happened: he is alive.


End file.
